Ramaswamy backs opening Ohio retirement funds to crypto while holding a $69M stake in a bitcoin treasury company

Vivek Ramaswamy’s bitcoin problem is not the ordinary kind. Plenty of candidates own stock in industries they would regulate. What makes the Republican nominee for governor different is that his position is leveraged — and the bill he has praised would point Ohio’s retirement money at the exact asset his leverage rides on.

Start with the instrument. House Bill 18, the Ohio Strategic Cryptocurrency Reserve Act, is described almost everywhere as a bill that would let Ohio put 10% of certain funds into crypto. That description is half right, and the missing half is the part that matters.

The 10% ceiling applies to the treasurer of state. Under the bill, the treasurer could invest interim money from the general revenue fund, the rainy-day fund and the lottery’s deferred prizes trust in digital assets, capped in the aggregate at a tenth of the fund balance at the time of purchase. The bill also restricts what qualifies: the asset must be an exchange-traded product whose average market capitalization over the preceding twelve months is at least $750 billion. Bitcoin, at roughly $1.33 trillion, clears that bar comfortably. Ether, at about $233 billion, does not. The bill never says the word “bitcoin.” It does not need to.